Hear Will Hodgkinson’s field recordings of Stephanie Hladowski and Cate Le
Bon: Listen
to O Ma Gariad I Listen
to Willie O Winsbury
The Muslim quarter of Bradford is not a place generally associated with
English folk music. You are more likely to hear the muezzin’s plaintive wail
than a ploughboy’s ode to a nymph-like lover. But it’s here that I have
arrived to make a field recording of a 21-year-old daughter of Polish
immigrants called Stephanie Hladowski who, someone in Cornwall reliably
informed me a week previously, has a way with the old songs of our small
island.
I have never met Hladowski, let alone heard her sing. But I have decided to
take a gamble and make the long drive to Bradford in the vague hope of
capturing an authentic folk moment. Hladowski, a small, pretty woman who
lives with her parents and is applying for jobs as a teaching assistant,
opens the door. After a dinner of goulash cooked by her mother we go to the
top of the house.
“I always loved singing,” she says in a lispy, uncertain way as I take out a
portable recording device called a Zoom. “I was in school productions of Grease
and Bugsy Malone. But I’ve never sung professionally or anything like
that.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her brother’s bedroom, she gives
an unaccompanied rendition of a Scottish ballad called Willie o’ Winsbury.
It is the most spine-chillingly beautiful version of this stark, ancient
song I have heard.
A few months previously I had embarked on a new goal: to travel around Britain
making field recordings and document that journey in a book, The Ballad
of Britain. The idea was to capture the spirit of the land and its
people, to find out how landscape and community affect the music that comes
out of a place. This is not a new endeavour. At the turn of the 20th century
the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the folklorist Cecil Sharp travelled
through the South of England in search of songs that were, in Vaughan
Williams’s words, “primarily national in character”.
In the 1950s the American musicologist Alan Lomax worked his way through
England and Scotland to make recordings of Gypsies, farmers and fishermen
singing the songs that had been passed down through their families for
generations. What these pioneering figures collected is what now, rightly or
wrongly, passes as our folk heritage.
Britain is a much-changed place since then, radically altered by mass media,
mass immigration and greater mobility and literacy rates. What is our folk
music of today? Is it a teenage girl rapping into her mobile phone on the
top deck of a bus, or a Shropshire stone-waller with a finger in his ear
singing about ripening seeds in the month of May? It was after a
conversation with friends on this very subject that I resolved to dedicate
the better part of 2008 to finding an answer to this question.
In the popular imagination, British folk music conjures up images of
dysfunctional, bearded men with bladder issues who smell faintly of warm
beer and wee. Morris dancing, the closest thing England has to a national
folk dance, is a national joke. “It makes you think of child molesters,” one
friend offered, a little unfairly. So I started the journey by penetrating
the dark heart of the underground morris scene — at Headington Quarry,
Oxford, where Cecil Sharp first saw morris dancing, on Boxing Day in 1899.
What I found, outside a village pub on an otherwise quiet spring evening, were
middle-aged men bedecked in bells and ribbons, drinking from personalised
beer tankards. They danced in formation to lively jigs, whacked at each
other with sticks, made lively whooping sounds and waved handkerchiefs
about. Yet, despite the jollity, they were feeling the sting of
victimisation. “We keep going . . . just,” said a large man dressed as a
horse, after a rather lewd dance called The Maid of the Mill came to
a raucous end. “The youngsters don’t want to know,” another added
despairingly. “It’s the computer age and all that. I could hardly go into a
pub and say, ‘Come on lads, let’s go dancing’, could I? They’d tell me to
eff off.”
Philip Larkin’s assertion that “the English have become poor caretakers of
Englishness” never seemed more apposite. But as the journey progressed it
became clear that many places have developed their own character and sense
of pride that has little to do with the rest of Britain. Sheffield is a case
in point. Not only do the hardest men in this famously hard industrial town
call you “luv”; they also have a surprising weakness for experimental music.
In the basement of a townhouse in Sheffield I recorded a group of
working-class men that met regularly to create what the unenlightened might
call an horrific noise.
Apparently this is not unusual. While there, I caught up with local boy done
good Jarvis Cocker, to get his take on why such a down-to-earth place
produces such strange music. “When ]Fad Gadget and the Human League were
around everyone said they were a result of the fact that Sheffield is an
industrial city,” Cocker said, after a visit to his favourite fish and chip
shop in a semi-derelict neighbourhood called Neepsend. “I always thought
you’d want a rest from it if you’ve been working at the steel factory all
day. But there have been a lot of hare-brained schemes to make Sheffield the
city of the future and maybe the bands reflected that.”
Further field recordings proved that, despite our globalised age, there is
still such a thing as locality. In the fishing village of Anstruther, in
Fife, half of the population appears to have been bitten by the songwriting
bug, performing in the Ship Tavern and self-releasing CDs under such exotic
names as King Creosote, the Pictish Trail, Gummi Bako and Super S***box
before going back to jobs as van drivers, teachers and fishermen.
In the area of Pembrokeshire known as the Dyfed Triangle, a Welsh-speaking
local population, an influx of hippies in search of rustic bliss and a
plentiful supply of magic mushrooms have produced a generation of surreal
Welsh-language songwriters — and record UFO sightings. I recorded a young
woman called Cate Le Bon in a field of sheep on a typically wet August day.
Her music was exotic yet unpretentious, much like the Dyfed Triangle itself.
What the journey really taught me is that everyone has a story to tell;
everyone has a song worth singing. The British may be a rather dowdy,
unstylish lot, and the M6 may not have the glamour of Route 66, but from
football terraces to school playgrounds we remain a nation of songsters. Our
folk songs are whatever becomes public property, whether that means a pub
singalong of Scarborough Fair or children playing skipping games to
the tune of Umbrella by Rihanna. The old ballads of England live on
in ways that are not obvious: rock bands from Led Zeppelin to the White
Stripes have taken them as starting points for their own material. And as
the recording with Stephanie Hladowski proved, Britain is awash with people
singing songs not for a dream of becoming rich or famous — highly unlikely
given the state of the music industry — but because they love it.
“It’s funny,” Hladowski says, after singing that haunting version of Willie
o’ Winsbury. “When I sing these old British ballads I feel deeply
connected with them, even though I’m more Polish than English. I wonder if
that’s unusual.” It’s not, because it is in music, more than any other art
form, that the British spirit is captured. Britishness — an idea, a feeling,
a corner of the imagination — endures and returns, again and again.
The Ballad of Britain is published by Portico on August 1 at £12.99. To
buy it for £11.69 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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